Orchids and Stone

by Lisa Preston

  PRAISE FOR ORCHIDS AND STONE

  Daphne is both physically tough and emotionally vulnerable, a heroine readers will love and root for in this fast-paced, gripping read.

  —Laura Moriarty

  Gritty and powerful.

  —Jo-Ann Mapson

  A mesmerizing debut that is part mystery, part modern love story, and thoroughly gripping. Orchids and Stone stars a bright, uniquely independent woman who is strong enough to define her own future and tender enough to rediscover both love and forgiveness. Lisa Preston’s deftly layered narrative crescendos to a nail-biting climax that surprises and satisfies.

  —Carol Cassella

  Daphne is a strong central character, complex and fundamentally stunted by tragedy in her life. With lyrical writing and nuanced characterization, Orchids and Stone will have you rooting for Daphne’s redemption amid pulse-pounding car chases. It’s a book that has something for every reader!

  —Kate Moretti

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Text copyright © 2016 Lisa Preston

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Thomas & Mercer, Seattle

  www.apub.com

  Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Thomas & Mercer are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

  ISBN-13: 9781503952324

  ISBN-10: 1503952320

  Cover design by Mumtaz Mustafa

  In memory of C

  CONTENTS

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  CHAPTER 24

  CHAPTER 25

  CHAPTER 26

  CHAPTER 27

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  AUTHOR Q&A: LISA PRESTON, AUTHOR OF Orchids and Stone

  BOOK CLUB QUESTIONS FOR Orchids and Stone

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  CHAPTER 1

  Daphne didn’t quit college to become a roofer. When the first day of spring break became the night her father killed himself in a hotel room, she drove his car the two-plus hours back to the university the next morning. Gathering her clothes, photos, and a shoebox of desk items, she abandoned her textbooks and extra school supplies in the quad atrium, free to any takers.

  College was supposed to be more than an escape from her half-empty bedroom and stymied parents, but she left Western Washington University thinking she’d always been a poser there, never a good fit with dorm life. Finishing part of a semester more than her dead big sister counted, like all half measures, for nothing.

  No solace waited at home. For the first time since she was eleven, her father wouldn’t be there in the evening, burning. No restive three-word chant or even his less common complaint, “Nobody makes an effort,” would burst from him after the hours whiled away and he slumped up the stairs.

  Quiet and comfort were not the same thing. In the wake of her impulse to drop out of school, she dreaded surreal days and evenings to be passed at home. Her trembling mother offered no answers.

  Haunted since childhood about the thing she never found and things she never said, Daphne drove slower as the miles brought her near home and she took an earlier exit into Seattle. Wondering what her mother knew and should have known, Daphne told herself she was a rotten daughter for not returning home without delay. She idled the car in the far lane, honked at by drivers with deadlines.

  A roadside placard in front of bulldozed black dirt announced: Openings, Training Available, Ask about our Women-In-Construction Program. Daphne parked her father’s sedan among the pickup trucks and SUVs. Beyond the sign, construction bustled on numerous six-plex apartments; some building exteriors appeared finished and others bore open-framed walls. Concrete slabs ghosted the footprint of apartments to come. New building skeletons took hammer blows as men raised sheets of siding to the exteriors.

  Men in hard hats, leather work gloves, flannel shirts, and brown Carhartts or heavy blue jeans moved with burly purpose. Suspenders burdened their shoulders with the weight of enormous tool belts.

  These men drove beeping forklifts packing stacks of lumber. They spread blueprints on truck hoods, shot nails with powered guns, and pointed at other men, tools, pallets, and buildings. They gave and received orders in shouts.

  “You lost?” The man in front of her wore boots, jeans, and a sneer.

  “You … you h-have jobs open.” She winced at her childish stammer, awash in the feeling of being half-adult. She’d told her best friend, Thea, about this sensation, upon Thea’s graduation the previous spring. But Thea, with one year on Daphne and all about getting a job with her new journalism degree in order to move permanently out of her parents’ house, pretended not to understand how matriculation to adulthood loomed as a daunting milestone for Daphne.

  “I mean, the sign says …” Daphne ended with a wave at the driveway placard.

  The construction worker in front of her snorted. “Yeah, you’ll last an hour.” His next comment came with a giant wad of spit while he muttered to the ground about her—her balls? Then he pointed toward a white trailer. “Check in at that Atco.”

  What’s an Atco? Daphne wanted to ask. At the trailer, she accepted a form to fill out, checking the NONE block next to the words: Experience Level?

  You’ll last an hour.

  The words hung over her. Outside, a guy named Bob handed her a hammer after a guy named Dick welcomed her and said to listen to the foreman, who would let her know after a full day tomorrow if she was hired.

  Foreman, Daphne puzzled as they handed her a scrap board, a handful of nails, and told her to drive them. “Seriously?”

  Bob nodded. Dick went back into the Atco. Is Bob the foreman?

  You’ll last an hour.

  Daphne caught her tongue between her teeth and drove the first nail, keyed with self-consciousness. She couldn’t remember hammering anything before but pretended competence with a starting tap before pounding the nail home with mean, targeted blows.

  “Good eye, but you don’t want to chew up the wood too much,” Bob said.

  She drove more nails, stopping when the heads nestled the plank.

  “Okay, I need you to load a roof.”

  “Load a roof,” Daphne repeated, not understanding but happy for any comment not taunting her about how long she’d last.

  “Yep. Can you carry these up?” He pointed to a pallet laden with packages of shingles, thumbed open a pocket knife, and sliced the plastic binders securing the packages.

  Daphne pulled one long bundle of shingles from the top. It weighed perhaps thirty-five or forty pounds. Healthy college girls could lift forty pounds, but they usually didn’t. They didn’t heft sharp-edged packages of shingles onto one shoulder and climb a ladder. They didn’t repeat the chore a dozen times in an hour. They didn’t labor hours on end.

  You’ll last an hour.

  She lasted, shaking, bringing bundles up the ladder with her jaw set. T
hin, screaming muscles engaged over and over.

  Ignoring the physical pain, there was an upside. Climbing a ladder at a construction site felt fun and naughty. Aloft, after the challenge of walking the bare, slanted roof to the peak, she saw a particular way to stack shingle bundles.

  Daphne worked with vicious determination, surviving each minute, proving the first man wrong. Extreme work beat driving a few more miles to her sister-less, father-less childhood home.

  Bob honked a truck horn mid-afternoon and all the men stopped working for fifteen minutes, gathering at his truck’s tailgate to take water from a yellow cooler. Daphne kept working in a dreamy daze, hauling shingles up the ladder, stacking them near the apartment’s ridge. She toiled through lunchtime and the afternoon break as well.

  At five thirty, when everyone below stopped working, her body and brain were so woozy she considered skipping dinner and going straight to bed. Maybe she’d sleep in the car at the construction site. It was real, this work. Guts and grit.

  The naysayer who’d sent her to the Atco cast a sidelong look, booting the empty pallet. “Most of us carry two bundles of roofing at once.”

  “Not all day, most of us,” a man walking past with a coil of nails said.

  “Most companies use power loaders,” snapped another guy, unbuckling his tool belt.

  “More than enough,” Bob said, and they all shut up. He turned to Daphne, “Can you be here at six? Load another roof?”

  The other men laughed and hooted about the power loader not being available to carry shingles onto the roof mechanically. Grunt work had to be done by hand this time and no one wanted the short straw. Bob raised a palm, the jeers stopped, and he asked again. “Six a.m.?”

  Daphne nodded.

  “Don’t forget your lunch.”

  That night, she cleaned her plate and was in bed by seven thirty. Her mother hugged her, but they didn’t talk. If her mother cried that night for her long-dead daughter or her looming first week as a widow, Daphne didn’t hear the weeping.

  Daphne didn’t imagine echoes of her father’s old mantra about Suzanne—someone saw something—when she went upstairs. She didn’t think about how hollow the house felt, how he would never come home. She didn’t think of questions and answers and comfort never to be given or received.

  The last she heard were faint sounds of her mother going outside to smoke then plunking on the living room sofa. She didn’t look across her bedroom at Suzanne’s empty bed or at the window beyond and think about promises lost or aching years gone by. She slept the unmoving sleep of the spent and knew no more.

  The alarm clock went off at five thirty but not because her big sister had snuck out and might need a safety net.

  Daphne’s body was so sore, she held her breath. The motion of allowing her chest to expand lanced her ribs. Opening her hands to wiggle her fingers hurt all the way up her arms. Her shoulders felt too battered for contemplation.

  Bad as the pain was, she found she could make her body move. This discovery was so amazing, she tested the possibilities. She pulled on jeans and an old shirt over her underwear, limped downstairs to wolf three times as much cereal as she’d ever eaten in one sitting, and made a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Leaving her mother a note about being out all day, she shoved away thoughts of notes her father and sister left, then drove her father’s car back to the construction site.

  This time, no one sneered about how she’d last an hour. One man bid her good morning, waving a handful of flat cardboard packages and a weird tool.

  “Staple hammer,” he said. “I’m Hal. We’re working together. After we lay paper, I’ll show you how we start shingles, get things square. Has to be perfect from the start.”

  Perfect sounded like a lofty goal, but the world of construction appeared to be an alternate universe, where new things were possible. She could force her screaming body to bend.

  “Perfect.” Daphne realized the foreman never intended to make her carry shingles today. He just wanted to see if she’d show up expecting to haul deadweight up a ladder.

  “Got a scribble stick?”

  “What?”

  “Do you own a pencil?”

  “Oh.” Daphne turned for the sedan amongst the pickups. Her father’s car was still packed with her college things. She rummaged for a pencil plus her little sharpener, then followed Hal to another section of the building project. This six-plex had a plywood-sheeted roof but was not yet tar papered.

  “First we have to load it,” Hal said.

  Daphne saw rolls of tar paper on a pallet by a ladder and allowed herself a satisfied smirk at the coming labor. When her scrawny muscles protested, she closed the part of her mind that listened to complaints of pain and worked.

  Hal nodded. “It’s the legs.”

  “It’s the legs.” And she pressed on, hefting tar paper, scaling the ladder.

  It seemed no time until Hal called for her to stop, said they had enough rolls of paper loaded and they needed to lay it out.

  Laying out tar paper on a roof turned out to be kind of cool. She liked kicking the roll after one end was attached, liked watching it unwind itself across the roof. She liked the repetition, smacking the staple hammer fast and hard along the length of the straightened paper. Before a horn honk announced the morning break, her first roof was papered. The building was huge, but they’d covered it with tar paper hauled up from a pallet down below. Hal said they were ready to roof.

  She didn’t like holding what Hal called “the dumb end” of the tape measure and she asked enough questions about what he was doing with his fancy metal triangle and T-square that he promised she could start the other side of the roof if they got that far.

  I’ll get that far, she promised, rolling her battered shoulders with satisfaction, studying the marks he made on their fresh tar paper, and noting the precise way he cut and fit two shingles in halves and thirds to get the process started.

  “This is the reveal.” Hal indicated the space where the shingles would overlap, marked the tar paper with his pencil at both ends of the roof and had her hold a chalk line, let her snap it. They lined yards of roof, readying to work.

  His pencil was an outsized, rectangular-shaped instrument that would never work in a pencil sharpener. When he broke the point, she was glad she’d grabbed her little hand-twist pencil sharpener when raiding the car for supplies. But Hal just used his razor knife, the same one he’d cut shingles with, and whittled a point back onto his pencil.

  She set shingles when and where he directed and didn’t wince when firing the nail gun. Construction was beautiful and reassuring. Something hard had to be done right and repeated ad nauseam.

  They stayed on the roof for their break. Hal ate a sandwich and she surveyed the site like an eagle after its first flight. The next time the horn honked and Hal reached for his lunch box, he hesitated. “Didn’t you bring a lunch?”

  “Oh, right.” Daphne went back to the car for her sandwich, happy to guzzle cups of water from Bob’s huge yellow cooler, happy to take her PB&J sandwich up the ladder to what now seemed like her roof.

  She’d built something.

  Below them, framers and plumbers and electricians and floorers scuttled like ants for their lunches. Daphne sat on the peak of her half-shingled roof and swallowed her sandwich.

  “That’s not enough to eat,” Hal said. “You’ll need at least four sandwiches a day. Eat one on the morning break, two for lunch, and one on the afternoon break.” He downed another meaty grinder.

  When she got to start the shingles on the other side and her pencil rolled off the roof, Hal loaned her his flat-sided carpenter’s pencil and they plowed on.

  The roof ridge was hard, much harder than she’d figured, with careful fitting of hand-cut shingles, but at the end of the day, she and Hal had roofed a building.

  “You’re hired,” Bob called out while she was coming down the ladder for the last time.

  Men sipping water at the cooler tipped their
cups to her.

  “You’ll be on a framing crew next week.”

  “M’kay.” She stepped off the ladder.

  Bob proffered a humongous hammer with a toothed head and claws that looked like they could rip concrete. “You’re gonna need tools.”

  Hal and the other men laughed. One introduced himself, said he ran the framing crew. She thought she might miss the rooftops but nodded, making a mental note about things she’d buy, a staple hammer, a roofing hammer, a framing hammer. A T-square, a metal triangle. A lot of rectangular pencils and a knife to keep them sharp. A tool belt with suspenders.

  “Bob let a guy go yesterday,” Hal said, getting into his truck as she headed to her dad’s car. “He doesn’t keep people with a bad attitude or people who don’t work their butts off.”

  Daphne wondered if Bob fired the guy who said she’d last an hour. She hadn’t seen him today. How long had he lasted?

  At her father’s graveside service, Daphne swayed between confusion and anger. A black wrought iron fence separated them from the consecrated ground where people who died without mortal sins on their souls were buried.

  Reginald Mayfield’s coffin was plain. Suzanne’s coffin had been more ornate, the centerpiece in a well-attended church service that twisted into a spectacle and struck then-eleven-year-old Daphne to her core. The boy Suzanne loved had pushed forward, caressing the coffin’s carved wooden edges, weeping in a singsong voice about touching her perfect body and Jesus being broken. The congregants’ collective gasps as that funeral morphed into something darker—as men in suits came forward and pulled the boy from the altar and police were summoned to quell the disturbance—all left young Daphne bewildered and helpless next to her parents’ anguish.